1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a question and answer database expansion apparatus and a question and answer database expansion method.
2. Description of Related Art
In recent years, a system is known which automatically answers a question from a questioner. For example, in a question and answer system, shown in FIG. 12, which uses a database having pairs of question sentence examples and answer sentence examples, in order to accurately answer a question, it is necessary for a database creator to postulate all kinds of questions and to create a database which has answers to cover the questions. FIG. 12 is a diagram illustrating an example of a question and answer system having a question and answer database. When there is no answer corresponding to a question from a questioner in the database, the system having the database may repeatedly requests a question or may select an improper answer from the pairs of questions and answers and may give an improper response.
For this reason, in the system using the question and answer database, it is necessary to increase the percentage of correct responses. In order to increase the percentage of correct responses, a method is suggested in which the system using the question and answer database has a plurality of language databases, and the plurality of language databases are retrieved to select response candidates (for example, see Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2004-118740). In creating the database, in order to increase the percentage of correct responses, the contents of the questions are recorded, and the database creator listens to the recorded questions and finds the questions which are not registered in the question and answer database. The database creator registers the found searched unregistered questions in the question and answer database.
However, the database creator listens to all the recorded questions, Transcribes the questions, detects questions (utterances) which are not registered in the question database, and registers the detected questions in the question database, leading to a large number of steps so as to find out the unregistered questions.